The Second Bedroom
My wife of six years and I had a good falling out, ever since we'd lost the two story house in Murrieta, California. The matter of divorce kept coming up between us, from either her lips or mine. I can tell you for certain that our best years were behind us.
It was with a low heart that I rented out a small, two-bedroom cottage in one of the crappier neighborhoods in San Diego. Ironically it was this same area that we'd both abandoned a few years earlier, when our fortunes and prospects had been much brighter.
Of course, I wasn't the only white-collar worker to lose my well paying job during the economic downturn. Nearly a third of the employees at the computer plant were laid off at the same time I got my notice, over eight hundred souls in total. I wasn't the only person in the world to lose my house either. Plenty of other families suffered similar devastation at the hands of the big banks and their swindles. But all the same, both from my wife's perspective and from that of her merciless and bitter side of the family, I was one hundred percent at fault. Many times over, I felt as if I was the only person on Earth being humbled by it all.
I scrambled about for a few months while searching for a new line of work. This was at a time when the scarcity of jobs was at its greatest. The lack of steady employment further depleted our savings into the high triple digits. It wasn't that long ago when both my wife and I enjoyed bank accounts comfortably set in the high four digits. We were both contributing regularly to our retirement nest egg then, but like the house, all that wealth is gone now.
Getting hired usually meant you knew somebody already employed where you were snooping around for a job. Through an odd combination of both perseverance and blind luck, I happened to run into an old friend. I told my buddy about my plight, he gave me a good reference to his manager, and that's how I was called in for an interview at the Do It Yourself Warehouse. Never mind that I'd already been trying to get a job there for several months already.
After jumping through numerous hoops, including multiple, on-the-spot interviews, a barrage of supposedly meaningful testing and an embarrassing urine analysis, I was given the proverbial thumbs up. My new job was to unload trailer trucks during the graveyard shift, and to roll the pallets out onto the sales floor. I was to stock whatever merchandise needed to be stocked into the racks, then catalog and store whatever remained into the upper shelving found all over the store.
It wasn't as profitable or as glamorous as my previous job. Far from it. My wife had become spoiled previously, by having a nice sum of cash made available to her after each and every paycheck. Understandably, she vented her frustrations on my person and was constantly bickering with me when that sum was no longer available. I was reminded of just how great a disappointment I'd become, nearly every time I lay in bed with my wife and made a sexual advance toward her. I could only watch as she turned a cold shoulder in my direction.
The house we were now living in had been built way back in the nineteen-fifties. It was a smaller companion to the much bigger, three bedroom structure that dominated the wider patch of land directly in front of it. The little house sat there like an afterthought, colored a pasty green. The backside of the larger residence was visible from its cozy living room window. An alley corrupted by trash and graffiti was visible from the even cozier kitchen windows in the back.
As mentioned previously, this cottage consisted of two small bedrooms, of the bare minimum ten by ten variety. The rectangular living room measured about twenty by ten. If you were to cut this distance in three uneven portions, you'd roughly have the dimensions of the crowded kitchen, the small dining area and the even smaller bathroom. The doors and windows were all barred, due to the crime infested elements of the neighborhood. The iron bars remained strong despite showing flaky black paint and frequent flashes of rust.
The property to one side was structured in much the same manner. The only real differences being that the main house and its companion cottage were both hued in a mustard yellow, and the main house had a sizable covered patio in its backyard. The house on the opposite side was blocked from view by a tall, wooden fence. A single-file grove of short, bushy trees ran along that side. The fence barely contained several guard dogs that barked, growled and lunged at the wooden boards in a terrifying manner, whenever I made my way to and from my vehicle.
In no uncertain terms, my wife informed me that she was not about to stay much longer in what she had labeled an atrocity of a home. Constantly, she threatened to move out and live with her parents, or one of her high-maintenance sisters. I had to tread around her lightly or risk having her frequently repeated threats come to bear fruition.
Perhaps she missed the 'for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer' portion of our wedding vows. Presently, those vows felt as if they were both ancient and nebulous, and somehow no longer held any relevance to our modern plight. Perhaps we were destined to split apart at some time in the near future. At that moment in time, I wasn't in such a great hurry to find myself living alone. Having no one to really talk to, or to prepare a warm plate for me when I arrived home from work.
As stated before, I worked graveyard hours at the time. My usual shifts started at eleven or twelve at night, and lasted until seven or eight in the morning. I'd taken to sleeping during the heart of the day, leaving my wife and I about as far apart as two people can get when they're living under the same roof. I'd get up around four or five pm. This was usually a good time for an argument to erupt between us. My wife would go to bed at eight or nine, at which point I was left to stare at the clock until it was time for me to leave for work.
After about two months of this routine, strange things started to happen. I won't make an attempt to sway your thoughts about these incidents. I'll just state the facts as I saw them with my own eyes, or felt them with my own senses. Whether you choose to believe me or not, I will leave that up to you.
My wife has a bit of a phobia when it comes to sex. Irrationally, she checks to make sure that all the doors are locked, so that nobody might walk in while we're involved in the act. My wife also checks to make sure that the curtains are shut all the way across the window, to make sure nobody might have a peek at us going at it. Finally, she turns out all the lights and closes the bedroom door, to ensure that we both have complete privacy. She does this every time, before we proceed any further than walking into the bedroom holding hands together.
To be honest, she even has a noticeable discomfort about performing the act while there is still daylight outside. Thanks to all of this, it was with some effort that I managed to coax her into performing oral sex on me deep into one afternoon. All was going well, until my wife got the sudden impression that we were being watched. This disturbed her so much that she immediately halted her actions. My wife even went around the house convinced that there had been some sort of breach in her safeguards. She found none, but rather than admit that she might have gotten a touch of paranoia, she insisted that she'd sensed someone in the house. No manner of pleading proved enough to induce her to resume her part in our lovemaking.
As it was a pleasant week, I nearly got lucky a second time just a few days later. My wife and I were lying in bed, nude. It was in the midst of foreplay, when she sat up and commented that there was a man standing in the living room. How she could see this in the dark, with the lights shut off and the curtains drawn, was beyond me. Hoping not to be left out to dry again, I volunteered to go out and take a look around. Of course, there was no one about. Just the same, my wife was already getting dressed by the time I went back into the bedroom.
While cursing her in my mind for her fickleness, I asked what this man looked like. I got this for an answer; he was a tall fellow, with his head shaved and a goatee. The man was walking through the living room moving his head as if he were listening to music through earphones. He wore no shirt, revealing a strong physique with muscles, tattoos and scars. He wore baggy red pants, and was either barefoot or wearing light colored sandals. Also, my wife divulged, the man was the color of a strong coffee.
A bloody good description, if you ask me. I began wondering if I should shut the cable off to prevent her from sitting in the house all day and watching reality shows and the like. We had a good argument then, where I, admittedly with no evidence, accused my wife of sleeping around behind my back. This resulted in her becoming angry enough to order me to empty out the second bedroom. Previously we'd filled up a good portion of that room with our furniture and boxed items from our old house in Murrieta.
The rest of the afternoon I spent clearing out the bedroom, and moving most of the boxes and miscellany into various closets or into the living room. Although we had no second bed frame, we did have a couple of extra mattresses that my wife could sleep on. I guess I could have given her my bed frame out of chivalry. Initially I held back from doing this, because I was hoping she'd reconsider and come back into my bed.
As per our normal routine, she went to sleep at her usual time of around eight or nine. I waited for a couple of hours until it was time for me to go to work.
My wife and I hardly spoke to one another after that. We could have been complete strangers to an outsider looking in. I was always asleep during the day. My wife would spend a large part of her day out of the house, usually wandering off to her mother's to gripe about me, or otherwise going out shopping with the spendthrift bitches that were her sisters.
On one occasion, I had the night off. During the wee hours, I was sitting at the kitchen table and looking at pictures of bikini-clad women on my laptop. That's when I caught the distinctive smell of marijuana wafting through the house. Of course I was no stranger to weed, but I hadn't smoked it in years. As far as I knew, neither had my wife.
I wondered what my wife would be doing lighting up at three o'clock in the morning. In fact, I went over to her bedroom to reprimand her. When I opened the door to the room I found her still fast asleep. Even stranger, the smell wasn't coming from her room, my nostrils informed me, but from the living room instead.
